


After the End of the End of the World

by hopeintheashes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everybody Lives, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25511797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopeintheashes/pseuds/hopeintheashes
Summary: "You're okay, you're okay, we got you back, we won."Natasha, after the end of the end of the world.As the tag says: Everybody lives.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Avengers Team
Comments: 3
Kudos: 44





	After the End of the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> I just finished rewatching everything MCU up through Endgame and, well, I reject their ending and substitute my own. Thank you to the internet at large (particularly the AV Club comments section) for the many ideas on what could be.

. . .  
. . .

She wakes to _pain_ , in shallow water, in half-familiar arms. The eclipse hangs in weird stillness above. She feels broken. Shattered. Like she shouldn't be alive. 

The strong arms lift her to sitting, and she leans against the body pressed against her back. She's not broken, she realizes, not dead: her pain is a ghost, an overlay, a memory of something that happened long ago and now. 

"Natasha?"

Breath in the lungs behind her. Life in the body around her. How—

 _"Natasha."_ The arms are holding her tight, and all she can do is hold them back. Her mind is working slow but it _is_ working— 

"Steve?" Uncertain, incredulous, breaking. 

He's weeping and she's aching, there in the shallow water, but that's not right; she was falling, she was dying, she was— 

"No!" She cries out and then bites down on her tongue, the sting of the rod in the Red Room still keeping her in check. Quieter, a sob: _"No."_

She can feel Steve's breath at her back; his stuttering lungs and his words in her hair, _"You're okay, you're okay, we got you back, we won;"_ but none of it makes any fucking sense because if she's here, if she's not laid out in a pool of spreading blood on high-mountain rocks, that means the stone was never— so they couldn't have— so what does that mean, they _won?_ She tries to look up and screams out again, the ghost-pain blinding. Steve shushes her like a child awakened in the night and fastens a bracelet around each of her wrists. Metallic fabric closes in around her, and so does the darkness, and so do Steve's words: _"Hang on, Nat, we're going home."_

. . .

She wakes to lake-breeze and leaf-sighs and she's shaking harder than she ever has in her life _(in her death)_ , and when she rolls over she vomits in the grass. Steve's there, and Bucky on her other side, metal arm bracing her, and Sam's voice: "I'll go get Bruce." 

They sit her on the porch and press a glass of water into her hand and they try to explain it, how they won in her absence, her non-existence; how Steve, on the mountain, brought her back, brought her home. She takes the smallest sip of water. Forces air through her lungs. Interrupts them mid-sentence. "Where's Clint?" 

They look at each other in a way that makes her heart stop until Sam says, "We didn't exactly tell him the whole plan." 

"If it hadn't worked...." Bucky shakes his head. "He couldn't lose you twice." 

She closes her eyes again. The pain is an overwhelming ache. 

Steve stands. "I'll call him now." Stops, like he's afraid if he turns his back on her she'll disappear. It's not an unfounded fear. She reaches for him, fingers shaking, and he takes her hand. 

"Thank you, Steve." 

He nods, and steps away. 

. . .

She wakes to Clint at her bedside, sobs wracking his breath, his fingers in her hair, and the dam in her own chest gives way. She pulls him down into the bed and they hold each other like they are one welded thing, forged in the fires of battle and death. They cry until they can't breathe, until there is no doubt that this body is real ( _god,_ every bit of it aches), and when her lungs give up she coughs and heaves like a drowning girl and Clint keeps her head above the waves. 

. . .

She sees Tony, once she can keep her eyes open for more than five minutes. He's wrapped in gauze and tech from fingertips to sternum, and up the right side of his neck. She's not sure whether he still has his ear. Bruce is keeping him under, and he's still and silent in a way that makes her stomach turn. Morgan whispers to him from his good side. Pepper watches with tears streaming down her cheeks until Happy takes Morgan outside. 

"He did it." Rhodey. Slipping into the room beside her. Hushed and awed. "He fucking did it." 

"How did he..." She trails off. Her voice keeps fading out on its own. 

"He almost didn't make it." Far away, like he's seeing it play out in front of him. "Danvers managed to get there, take the rest of the energy hit. He's pretty fucked up; Bruce doesn't know how long it's going to take for him to recover, or what it's going to look like when he does. But goddamn it, he's _alive_." Rhodey reaches out like he wants to touch Tony, to make sure he's real, but Tony's too fragile. It makes her head spin. Rhodey settles for just barely brushing a hand over the covers at the outline of Tony's foot. 

When Bruce comes in to check on Tony, Natasha goes back out to the porch. Watches Morgan lead Peter around by the hand. May's back in the city, trying to find a new apartment. New... stuff. Happy had packed up the apartment at some point in the first year, and had brought it all upstate to the new facility, so now— along with _her_ stuff, she realizes with a start— it's all just ruins and ash. 

Morgan says something to Peter, who looks around surreptitiously, and then they're flying through the air and she's squealing with delight and they're both in the branches of a tree, Morgan held safely to him in a harness of web. 

Natasha realizes that her lips have moved into the smallest smile. It feels unnatural, and foreign, and good. 

. . .

She sits on the porch, and watches Morgan and Peter play. Steve, Bucky, and Sam are over by what she's come to think of as the launchpad. What do you do with a time machine after you've undone time? 

Pepper appears in the doorway. Morgan pulls Peter down to the lake, apparently to find some fish. Pepper catches Natasha's eye, and half-smiles. Goes back inside again. 

Clint comes out a while later. Sits down beside her. Pulls his chair close. "I have to go back soon." His hand on hers. Making sure she's real. "Come with me." 

"No." She's thought it through a hundred times in the last two days. It would be beautiful; it would be fresh air and good food and getting to be Auntie Nat. It would be beautiful, and then the reality of the five years that was versus the five years that wasn't would inevitably come crashing down, and it's not her place to be there when their family's world implodes. 

"Please, Nat." Both of his hands taking one of hers, now. 

"When are you going to tell her?"

Clint pulls his hands back, and looks away. "I'm not." 

She turns to him, incredulous. "What do you mean, you're not?" 

"I have them back, Nat." Looking out at the kids and the lake. "I am not losing them again." 

It's a smoldering forest fire and they both know it. He gives it up. 

"Where will you go, then?" 

She gives him the closest to a wry grin she can muster. "I just came back to life, Barton. Give me a minute, here." 

. . .

"I'm going for a walk." Bucky. "You want to come?" 

She rolls her shoulders, her neck. She's been sitting on the porch for hours. Out here, she doesn't feel quite so much like an awkward guest in someone else's home. 

"Yeah. Sure." She tries to get up, and fails. _"Goddamn it,"_ she mutters. Bucky offers her his arm, and she reluctantly takes it, leaning on him more heavily than she'd like to admit as they make their way down their steps. 

They walk slow, and it feels wrong, wrong, wrong: to be hurting this much when her body is fine; to be leaning on the man who put two bullets in her, lifetimes and lifetimes ago; to be here in the calm of the woods after the end of the end of the world. 

"You seem... remarkably okay," she says to him, once they're in among the trees. She's reflexively scanning for threats, but it's just bluebirds and squirrels. 

He shrugs. "I was gone, and then I was back. Nothing new there." He glances at her, and away. "And this time, I got to stay me." 

She doesn't know what to say to that. 

"But I know that's not how it was for you all." Quieter. "And I do have some sense of what is to lose everyone at once. To have them just— gone, forever. No way to get them back." He pauses, like he's not sure if he should say the next part. "Steve had a way to get them back." 

She looks up at him, eyebrows raised. 

"He could've..." He shakes his head. "Well, he could've done a lot of things. But he decided to come back. To stay." His mouth twists. "And I think that was... might've been..." He's quiet. Pained. "For me." 

A laugh, breathy, barely there. "He fought the whole damn world for you. Is the rest of it really a surprise?" 

"It's too much." 

"Nah." She slips her arm around his waist, and he lets his arm settle around her shoulders. "You'd do it for him, right? So, go get that place in Brooklyn together that I know you've been looking at, and bring Sam if you want, 'cause god knows how you'll afford it otherwise, and accept the gift." 

He hums. "And you'll take your own advice on that?" 

She's tired. They turn to head back. "I'll try."

. . .

Bruce lowers Tony's sedation on the third day, just enough to bring him to. "Not everybody at once," he cautions, and so they all press into the hall and wait until Pepper and Morgan have had some time. They file in in ones and twos, Peter and Happy first, and there are tears and celebrations, Tony's usual wisecracks in whispered tones. Morgan's curled in the bed beside him, falling into sleep. 

Natasha lets everyone else take their turn before she steps into the room. Tony's breath catches when he sees her. 

"You're not real." Hazy. Pulling Morgan closer against him to prove he's not in a dream. 

"Sometimes I think that myself, but no, I seem to be here. In the flesh." 

Tony's shaking his head, slowly, imperceptibly. "So we—" Voice thick with emotion. "We got everybody?" He's looking at her, but she knows it's Bruce he's asking. 

"We're working on Vision." Bruce's voice is gentle. "Wanda and I are going to go to Wakanda once you're stable. Work with Shuri. See what we can do." 

Tony nods, and he's already slipping back to sleep, Pepper's hand on his, Morgan peaceful at his side. "Okay." Breath evening out. "Okay." 

. . .

Bruce finds her on the porch, knees to her chest in the chair she's claimed as her own. He leans against one of the posts. She still catches herself trying to meet his eyes just below the six-foot mark, and has to look up to find him. It pulls at her neck— the phantom pain, still— and she lets it show on her face. He settles onto the ground, back against the post and long arms resting on his knees. With her in the chair, they're eye to eye. 

"How are you?" Heartfelt, with a furrow of the eyebrows and lips; everything that is good about him, wrapped up in three small words. 

Tears prick behind her eyes. She searches. "I don't know." 

"That's understandable." 

She scrubs at her eyes with two fingers and tries not to shake, not to cry. There's a part of her that just wants to fall into his arms, but the restraint beaten into her as a child, it turns out, reaches through time and through death. 

Bruce puts his hand on her knee, letting the arm of the chair take the weight of his palm. He doesn't ask the question everyone else has been asking, the one about where she'll go, now that her home has been demolished in hellfire and brimstone. He doesn't try to tell her that it's going to be okay. He just sits with her and looks out at the sunset. She curls in the chair like a cat, taking his hand in both of hers. Lets her head rest on his wrist. It's hard to believe their fingers used to intertwine. 

Bruce carefully strokes her hair with his other hand. She's starting to drift, safe in his hands. 

"When you're ready..." he's quiet. 

"I'm ready." Half-asleep. She can't stay here forever, with Morgan and Peter playing in the yard and Pepper and Bruce inside, knitting Tony back together, piece by piece. She'll make her way down to Missouri eventually, after the flashover, the forest fire. She's not ready for Wakanda. Maybe Brooklyn, if the boys will let her be a fourth wheel for a while. The idea of being in a city, people all around, makes her skin crawl, but for now it seems like the best option of the bunch. She knows enough not to try to be alone. 

Bruce lets his hand come down, cupping her face, thumb brushing gently at her cheek. "Well, when you're ready, there's someone you should meet."

. . .

The air in Norway is clear in a way that doesn't feel like it should be possible. Cliffs and oceans, sea breeze, crisp and cool. For a moment, there seems to be only nature, no people. Or rock creatures and their giant insect companions haphazardly attempting to garden, but apparently she's wrong on that front as well. 

A presence behind her. "Hey." 

She turns to a woman like some seafaring goddess: cable knit sweater and deep eyes and quirked lips, long hair pulled back from her face and blowing around her in the wind. 

"You must be Nat." 

She nods, a little breathless. "Your majesty." 

Valkyrie laughs. "I guess so. Haven't quite gotten used to the title, but there's no one else around to claim it, so." She turns to yell down to the garden. "Oi! Korg! The seeds go _in_ the ground. Shouldn't you have that figured out by now?" 

Korg waves her off and continues scattering the seeds from waist-height. His companion appears to be chomping on the ones that come his way. 

Valkyrie shakes her head. "This is a... new assignment for them." She turns back to Natasha. "And you? The big guy said you had a 'skill set,' but he was pretty intentionally vague." She shrugs, nonchalant. "So I looked you up on the internet. You've got almost as much history as I do, apparently." 

"Oh. Yeah. I'm, uh, trying to stay as far away from that as possible. Wherever you want me, I'll go." 

"I think we can figure something out." 

They start down the hill, back to town, to the village built from the ashes of another world. She stops halfway down the path when she realizes that the ache that's followed her since Vormir has faded, here in the clear blue light. 

"Come on!" Valkyrie looks back expectantly. There's an echo in her eyes of everything that's been lost, but mostly there's determination. A chance to make something of the time they've been given back. She turns, and Natasha follows her. "We have a lot of work to do."

. . .  
. . .


End file.
